Googlearchy: Does Google Control Too Much?

I’m still not sure what to think after reading Hindman’s chapters.  I always found Google to be like my own personal Yoda that could bring me to anything, anywhere, by simply putting in a few words or even a few letters and I could narrow down my search and it was easier for me.  What Hindman is arguing, is that it might be easier for you to search things on the internet, and it might even be easy to write your own posts, but it is difficult to get your voice hear on the internet as he believes there is nothing democratic about it.  He looks to political websites and campaigns to exemplify his refute over internet democracy.  He explains the layers of the internet from the hardware to the transit to the content and then brings up hyperlinking, which he states, “The interlocking patterns that hyperlinks form are the reason the medium was named the Web in the first place…PageRank, the ranking algorithm that powers Google search engine, relies largely on the link structure of the Web to order its results.” (Hindman Page 40)  Basically he is saying, that we all go on the internet to look for information or to find something, but that website doesn’t matter if someone cannot find it and therefore the site receives no traffic and is just floating around cyber space with no people looking at it just because it didn’t rank well in the PageRank.  From what I gather from the reading, it seems that Hindman find this hyperlinking and search engines to be somewhat of a popularity contest and unfair to the rest of the websites out there who may not get as much attention as others as he states, “A few popular sites…receive large portion of the total links; less successful sites…receive hardly any links at all.  Traffic, like link structure follows a power law of distribution with roughly the same parameters.” (Hindman Page 42).  In using his example of the political sphere he looks to display the, “biases these limitations [hyperlinks and search engines] introduce in the number and types of sites encountered by typical users.” (Hindman Page 46).   

In other words, Google has become the most popular search engine and has 60 percent of the search engine market and with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo combined controlling 95%.  In regards to political sites, they are receiving no way near the same amount of traffic as sites such as porn or webmail, and it is because of the dominance of hyperlinks of other sites and a somewhat discrimination on the part of search engines, according to Hindman.  Hindman points out this is almost like a monopoly in the sense that everyone goes to Google and therefore are only going to see what Google thinks or ranks as important rather than some other search engines who might have more or different results.  When it comes to traffic the search engines can be seen as gatekeepers or mediators and even Hindman admits they can be both.  Search engines direct a large volume of traffic, he is questioning why certain sites get more or less.

HINDMAN'S GOOGLEARCHY

            I can see where Hindman is coming from when it comes to the search engines not being as democratic as we’d like to believe they are.  But as a user of the internet, frankly I just want something that is going to get me the quickest answer possible.  That’s what the internet has done for this generation.  We want instant gratification because we are used to clicking a link and something just appearing within seconds, and that is what I look for in a search engine.  I don’t want to go through a number of url’s just to find something appropriate.  I d rather type in a few words and have a search engine figure it out for me.  As for the search engine’s gatekeeper-like qualities, I think about what Deanna Zandt had said in her piece (Deanna Zandt) about how getting your site popularity is like working a cocktail party.  You don’t just stand on a table and scream your name for all to hear but rather you mingle, maybe give a business card to someone, and let them be your reference so others will want to know you (see your website).  I understand that Google owns a large amount of the search engine traffic which is clear as exemplified in Alexa’s Top 500 Sites (http://www.alexa.com/topsites) with Google taking the number one slot of most popular site visited and yahoo taking the number 4 slot.  I get that it probably does border on monopolizing, and yes that could lead to issues of only getting content from one area (as we have seen in media and communication history, things don’t necessarily work out when one company dominates a market such as AT&T or IBM) but I’d like to hear what would be a probable and viable solution to this issue that Hindman brings up. 

From Electromechanical-to-Digital-to-Hippie fiber lamps and BEYOND at Optical Light Speed…

The telephone switching and signaling process has come a long way in since the days of the rotary electromechanical or the analogues line and trunk switches. 

The CAS/CCS and SS7 signaling techniques were developed when the electromechanical telephone switches and Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) were slowly being phased out by the digital telephone switches and to replace all the additional associated external signaling units for dedicated voice channels. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28telecommunications%29

The digital switching technology also changed the real estate factor due to the size of the associated hardware. Once required tens of thousand of square foot to hold the hardware for a standard electromechanical switch can now be fitted into less than 25 percent of the original floor space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange

The analogue multiplexing equipment that once connects the old switches and the analogue transmission medium also got a digital facelift and liposuction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_%28computing%29

Of course once the switches are digitized, the transmission medium and the network need to catch up with the rest of the digital technology.  The analogue radios and microwave towers with the old school HUGE channel banks and multiplexing equipment the size of the 16 wheeler box car were replaced by digital multiplex the size of a campus quad frig.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS-100  (Nortel Digital Switch)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network  (VPN)

Remember those Hippie fiber lamps in 70s? Who woulda thought that one day these optical fibers would be the backbones of optical technology that would go on to carry GOZILLION bits of data. Go figure. Oh yeah, them suckers are impervious to EMP, you know Electrode Magnetic Pulse, so the network would still be operating after a nuclear attack.  OMG, OMG, WORD? ...Like, Yeah! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier (T1/E1 Carrier)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber  (Optical Fiber)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing  (DWDM)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking  SONET)

What is NOW in your iPhone would require the size of a Kenworth 18wheeler truck to contain back in late 1970s. The radio equipment for the Wi-Fi, the multiplexing hardware to support the 4G Network data transmission, the telecom switching and signaling processing and protocols, the GPS apps, etc, etc, etc….

I believe Cisco is taking the opportunity to market their goodies (See products and services at below link) in on this digital optical network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Systems

Dubstep!

Thought some of you folks might get a chuckle out of this:

Copyright

So what should be done regarding copyright and the Internet?
In Cory Doctorow's piece Lockdown, we see the birth of the Internet economy. Where the government "assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information." This didn't work out as planned because you would have to find a way to control the way people used their computers, and what files they transferred. When thought about, this idea seemed to just create more and more problems. The solution in 1996 was the WIPO Copyright Treaty. The treaty made it illegal to basically figure out the secrets behind unlocking programs and extracting media, but that inevitably failed and only make copying that much easier. Doctorow explains that in deciding if a law is going to fit a purpose it must go through two tests- whether it will work and whether or not it will have effects on everything else. He uses an example of not being able to regulate something as simple as the wheel because bank robbers escape in cars which are wheeled vehicles. You can't do this because after performing the two tests stated above, there is now way to make a wheel that is useful for the public, yet useless for bank robbers. However, if the same test was used to show the negativity of hands free phones in cars, you could have something there because you are not changing the design of the car- it's still a car at the end of the day, just without a hands free phone inside. Unfortunately, this cannot work for the Internet. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Shutting down a website from the net doesn't change anything. The best part of this piece was when Doctorow goes on to discuss SOPA, and how the government was "ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level- all in the name of presevering Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies." He indicates that a general computer that only runs programs that don't "scare" or "upset" the government can't exist, and that we must win the copyright war somehow, before we can move forward.
In James Boyle's The Public Domain, he discusses what he calls "The Internet Threat." He implies that the effortless copying that can be done on the Internet poses a threat to culture production. He thinks there should be more property rights, harsher penalties for infringements, and more protection for those infringements. He calls for a regulation on technology so that the supposed war on copyright can come to an end. To be frank, I found his chapter on the topic rather harsh and hard to follow. After he discussed law after law after endless law, I got the gist. He goes on to discuss what can be done to give intellectual property the same rights at materialistic and tangible property. This makes me think of a class discussion we had regarding intellectual property and Facebook. If i wanted to, if I thought I had a great enough facebook status, I could copyright it. But does that mean that someone can't just copy and paste what I've said and make it their status? Sure, maybe they can't legally quote it and sell it on T-shirts and coffee mugs, but they can still take the idea. So at the end of the day, it really seems so out of reach to be able to have restrictions on anything on the web at this point in the game, as there is just too much information out there.

Copyright

      In today's reading we saw a lot of information about the pros and cons of how copyright came into being for our digital age, and how it has many faults that fall through the cracks. In "Lockdown, the coming war on general purpose computing" We are shown that from the get go, media publishers and producers have been striving to keep content locked down. Although I agree that this is warranted to a degree, sometimes they go well above and beyond what is necessary to protect their product. These unfair rules, regulations, and coding are then stripped apart by those with the knowledge to do so, and thus create bigger problems for these company's. In Lockdown, we are given a good example of how regulations put in place to protect copyright might also consequentially negatively effect other things that have nothing to do with it. In the reading by Doctorow, he states that if we saw a robber using a wheel on his getaway car, would we ban wheels all together? No, we wouldn't because that would effect the larger masses way more then deter those robbers. We would not be able to create a wheel that is effective for the masses but not for just robbers. The same holds for some copyright law.

      I feel disheartened when I think about the way that SOPA almost passed through our nation, It would have broke the very fibers that our nation was built upon. I don't blame the entertainment industry that backed the bill and helped push it through, I blame the government officials who have no knowledge of what kind of damage this bill could have done, nor care that it even made it that far. Our government officials are so out of touch with the technology of this era that it baffles me. I fear for our nation if we continue to elect people who have no knowledge of how our world is evolving into the digital age.

     My favorite quote from the reading was found at the end, it said "We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks." This to me is the most important statement of the whole reading. For us as a society to survive and flourish, we need to be able to maintain and monitor our own computers without depending on the government to play big brother with their own set of programs that limit what we can and cannot do. If the day ever comes when we as a nation are required to have or not have certain programs on our computer, then that will be a dark dark day for American society.

Computers and Copyrights

This weeks readings are based on the idea of trying to figure out the boundaries that should be placed on computers and the governments' hand on providing/relinquishing/understanding this toll. Cory Doctorow and James Boyle both stand on different positions in describing the computers ability of giving out information through copyright.

James Boyle's reading I found to be more technical than Cory Doctorow's, who culminates a mixture of outside examples to illiterate his point. I did like in the beginning how he mentions that the government, though slow to other things, has responded to the Internet rather quickly (which can be seen from its infancy). Though this is true, I feel that he needs to point out that perhaps it was too hasty and the laws/rules established within copyright throughout the years are a testament to that. Boyle does say that, "It did not help that the legislators were largely both ignorant and distrustful of the technology of the Internet..." (Boyle 57). Though this is mention, he is still a strong proponent of the legislators enforcement of rules, and the need of having certain rules. The author talks about Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the White Paper and some of its downsides, but he does not mention as a whole that perhaps these downfalls keep happening due to a lack of true understanding of how the Internet should be treated/operated, as well as, perhaps more importantly for this week, regulated. The making of laws for the Internet s complicated and I believe that Doctorow does a good job in explaining why this is.

Out of the two, Cory Doctorow's "Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing" was my favorite. Perhaps, I agree more strongly with his argument that the placement of laws/rules on computers are a lot more complicated than, as he would say, 'taking off a wheel of a car'. Computers are complicated due to the amount of people it reches, the amount of information that can be disclosed, and the amount of areas in which computers are affiliated with. Computers are a global phenonmenon within this day and age and all of it's "problems" cannot be solved by one easy fix.

I especially loved Cory Doctorow's point of, "MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplies and issues...government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb...information technology confounds these heuristics". I believe this is one notion that everyone has to keep in mind when it comes to goverment regulations, especially in accordance with the Internet. I immediately thought back to, I beileve, an episode of the Daily Show which made fun of the legislatures who were sticking up for the SOPA bill but couldn't describe it. They would phrases such as: well our nerds handle all the technical stuff. Or, the nerds know more about that. I was so upset that this was the lingo being used, "nerds". The real thing that bothered me is that these people were pushing for a bill that even they can't summarize. Doctorow's article though helped remind me that politicians, lawmakers, and other governmental officials deal with the legistics of the people as a whole, and as he says, "We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning"; the lawmakers are not technical gurus.

The Internet Conflict Between Fair Use and Control

“We’re writing today to ask you to please boycott all Streetlight related items by not purchasing any of our records or merchandise from Victory’s website, any traditional CD stores, online third party retailers or any digital distribution service (iTunes, Amazon etc). Victory has a long-time reputation of pocketing all of the proceeds from a band’s music and merch, with shady accounting and generally bully-ish behavior. If you want to support Streetlight, our music and our ability to tour and continue to release music, please make all SM related purchases from our own webstore, The RISC Store (www.riscstore.com), or come out to a show and buy a shirt or cd from us directly. In regards to getting the music we make, you can buy directly from us, or, alternately, we’re sure you can find a way to get the tunes onto your computer that may not be, ahem, traditional… Speaking a Bit metaphorically, there is a Torrent of methods to accomplish this, and Google is your always loyal friend…”

“Streetlight Manifesto ProudlyBoycotts Itself”

“Streetlight Manifesto realize that they are fighting a copyright blockade. They’re artists. They want to get paid. But the copyright blockade, the copyright cartel, is making that impossible. So they’re going to go around the blockade. We should support all of these bands and all of these artists to totally destroy the copyright cartel. Copyright law as currently iterated—lifetime plus 70 years—is immoral and it’s completely economically unfeasible.”

Max Keiser of The KeiserReport 

Frankly, I had never heard of the punk/third-wave ska band Streetlight Manifesto until just yesterday, when I watched a particularly relevant-to-copyright episode of RT’s The Keiser Report, a weekly program of entertainingly over-the-top (though almost always razor-sharp) financial news analysis and opinion with ex-Wall Streeter Max Keiser and his sidekick, political analyst Stacy Herbert. SM’s battle with its record company and the other stories Keiser and Herbert discussed in the episodes’ first half, strike me as useful examples to focus thinking about the economics of the internet, particularly as influenced by copyright law, as discussed by James Boyle and CoryDoctorow, to name two. Before I get deeper into the discussion, here is a brief summary of the other items Keiser and Herbert referenced:

• According to Bloomberg, Hector Xavier “Sabu” Monsegur, alleged leader of the Anonymous hacker group LulzSec who is apparently cooperating with the FBI to break the group, pled guilty in federal court in Lower Manhattan to, among other charges, “breaking into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer servers in El Segundo, California, where he obtained confidential data on about 100,000 users of its sonypictures.com website and into Sony Music Entertainment’s computer systems in Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia, U.S. authorities said. He later admitted sharing that information with other LulzSec members, court records show.” U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska told Monsegur he faced 122 ½ years in prison for the combined charges.

• Slashgear reports that “Sony has inadvertently found itself funding FreeAnons, after band Atari Teenage Riot agreed to one of its tracks being used in a PS Vita commercial but donated the fee to the Anonymous legal support group. Alex Empire of Atari Teenage Riot has some history with Sony – the company used a track of his without permission back in 1999 in a Handycam commercial – and so couldn’t resist suggesting track Black Flags when the Japanese company came looking for music for its new Vita advertising campaign. The song contains multiple references to Anonymous and has been used in several Occupy Wall Street (OWS) promotional videos.”
  
  
• From GoodEReader: “Smashwords, the popular online ebook distribution platform that recently celebrated the uploading of the 100,000^th title to its catalog of digital editions, found itself embroiled in some controversy over a request from PayPal that it remove nearly 2,000 titles that the online payment company considered inappropriate or offensive. Failure to do so would result in the deactivation of Smashwords’ PayPal account. At the risk of losing the ability to let customers make their ebook purchases through the internationally recognized payment method, Smashwords was able to forestall the removal of the titles while they continue to negotiate with PayPal.  

What strikes me about these stories is that they reflect ongoing economic and political power conflicts between, shall we say, internet users and creators on one side and regulators and corporations on the other—between those who demand or expect the internet to remain free and minimally regulated and those who view an unregulated internet as a threat to be controlled for the sake of security (and profit). 

The LulzSec case, on its face, seems not exactly relevant to the others. Some might call “Sabu” and his cohort abusers and destroyers. But I think Keiser makes a good (if scattershot) point when he compares the penalties the LulzSec crew now face to those faced by, for example, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation in the ongoing phone-hacking scandals in the UK (and possibly elsewhere), or the US and European banks that allegedly manipulated (“hacked,” as Keiser puts it) the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) to reap easy profits.  “The double standard here,” Keiser says, “is because the Hollywood industry, the MPAA, the RIAA, they have hundreds of millions of dollars at work for lobbyists in Washington. The consumer protection bureau … that protect[s] people from predatory bankers, doesn’t have any money at work in Washington. So you see really clearly how the laws are written by the lobbyists. These people who are for the copyright cartel, they [want to] put this guy [Monsegur]  in prison for 122 years. The people who hack into LIBOR, Goldman Sachs hacking into Greece, MF Global being hacked into by JP Morgan, they write those laws for themselves…and everything is hunky-dory.”

Keiser’s cynical point harmonizes (if somewhat discordantly) with Boyle’s account of how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was written and who it was designed to protect and benefit. Boyle doesn’t come right out and say “Follow the money,” but in his chapter on “The Internet Threat,” he focuses on the historic tension, as the cost of copying has approached zero, between the interests pushing for more control over copyright (and its potential for profit) and those wanting to protect and expand the idea of fair use. On Boyle’s account, in a White Paper making the case for the DMCA, “[t]he attitude toward fair use was particularly revealing” of the ideology that went into the writing of the law.

At one point … it was hinted that fair use might be a relic of the inconveniences of the analog age, to be discarded now that we could have automated fractional payments for even the most insignificant use.  (It was noted, however, that some disagreed with this conclusion.) At another point, fair use was described as a “tax” on rights holders and a “subsidy” to those who benefited from it, such as educational institutions.

The thrust of the proposed legislation was to “correct” this perceived imbalance in the relationship between copyright holder and “fair user.” Ironically, one of the technologies that influenced the DMCA’s more hardcore view of copyright was Sony’s Betamax video tape recorder, which made it easy for consumers to copy movies and other content from television to watch at will. Now Sony is more often on the same side as the Motion Picture Association of America members who, without the benefit of knowing they would ultimately earn up to half their profits from creating content for the new devices, viewed the VTR/VCR, not altogether unrealistically, as a serious threat to the movie-going habits of the public. But in the 1970s, it was Sony’s device (and the company’s victory in front of the Supreme Court) that thwarted the industry’s designs to dictate more restrictive copyright law, until the more ethically challenging Napster and Grokster cases came along to make the Internet all scary for the content creators again.

Doctorow is on the same side of the liberty vs. control dilemma as Keiser and Boyle (and me), but he puts the blame for the prevalence of the control point of view, not on the influence of money or economic self-interest on the political system but, rather, on the failure of legislators to appreciate the general-purpose nature of computers and the internet. Doctorow thinks the “copyright wars” are just a taste of more contentious power struggles to come. “The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation,” he says.

In a way, the final story in the Keiser Report’s list of items above is emblematic of Doctorow’s warning. PayPal was not threatened by the ability of people to get certain classes of erotic fiction over the Internet; it was threatened by people paying for them through PayPal. Why? The company has not made that clear. According to the Chicago Tribune, it originally tried to claim it was only following the policies of the banks and credit card companies it deals with, a claim at least one company denied. The good news—for now—is that PayPal has come to an agreement with Smashwords. “PayPal's new policy will focus only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text, spokesman Anuj Nayar said on Tuesday. The service will still refuse, however, to process payments for text-only e-books containing child pornography themes.” 

But Jane Vertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, pointed out, “Verbal descriptions of child pornography are not illegal. That's why we can read Lolita.”

Update: Edited to correct misspellings of names.

The Internet and Copyright

          In the article "Lockdown", by Cory Doctorow, he brings up many great points about the laws passed to stop copyright infringement. His main argument seems to be that, it does not work. There is no ACTUAL regulation. The public, especially computer savvy individuals, are always going to find new ways to unlocking programs or illegally extracting files. Doctorow mentions about the possibility of controlling computers and file transferring, and again, it does not work. In 1996 the WIPO Copyright Treaty was passed which created laws that made it illegal "to extract secrets from unlocking programs" and "extract media form the unlocking programs while they were running". It also made it illegal to share these secrets and to host copyrighted works. He sarcastically states that the treaty ended illegal copying, but in fact, he again argues that it only made it worst. Greater problems will only begin to pile up, leading to even more illegal "copyrighted works". Doctorow goes on to criticize our politics and how certain laws are passed based on a policy, or "rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue". One of my favorite lines in this article was his criticise on copyright enforcement : 'something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done'. "As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was fawed from the outset." This clearly supports the notion that our policies are not made by experts in the fields of computer programming or information technology, as Doctorow mentions. But in fact, these laws or regulations are made simply to meet the needs of having some sense of order or control.

          Doctorow does not argue for or against controlling the internet or anything related. He points out the facts. Controlling computers or technologies that has the capability of being hacked is just not possible. If it is, it would only lead to privacy concerns and that another big issue added to this copyright "war". Rootkits will always be around and people are always going to find ways to get what they want. A cheesy supportive statement would be, "When there's a will, there's a way."

         On the other hand, in Chapter 4 of "The Public Domain", Boyle seems to support the use of greater control and strict regulations of intellectual property. Boyle states that the 'technology of freedom' (referring to the Internet), needs to become a technology of "control and surveillance. If this were the case,  there would be so much protest against it. Other issues would come up and this would become an even bigger issue. Many of what the internet is today, was shaped by the users, not the companies who produce or contribute to it. To have most of that freedom or creativity taken away would be disastrous. 

Thought about copyright

            This week’s topics are copyright and online infringement. In Lockdown, Corry Doctorow is not positive about the strong copyright regulations over the online contents. He indicates some failure instances of Digital Rights Management, including challenge-response-protocol detector and encrypted files, which is because it limited the ability of the software to those who legally paid for it and even though the content’s founders put the stops for copying, users somehow had found way to unlock it. When newer and newer regulations came out to strengthen the act of copyright, it caused other failures. Doctorow compares these solutions as detergent that looks like it is working well when it is used on clothes but as a result it actually destroys the cloth by eroding the surface. For example, Sony used covert rootkit installer on its audio CDs that terminate its own sound files when it detects an extraction of its files. It works similar to spyware by hiding existence of oneself and performing without the user knowing.  In the end, that kind of surveillance attempts will invade privacy and human rights. Doctorow writes that we need to win the copyright war in order to keep the internet and the PC free and open.  

            On the other hand, James Boyle emphasizes the importance of the copyright. According to Boyle, the internet is a potential threat for artists and creators. He writes that intellectual property is different from material property and he sees that without ascent of private property rights, cheaper copyrights will kill the creative and cultural industries. Intellectual property rights should yield the certain amount of incentive in purpose to encourage the level of creative innovation. Thus, Boyle argues that we need control over_ private intellectual property and therefore we must have each computer with an individual ID, we must license the contents, not buy_them on specific computers for certain periods times. Moreover, he suggests to remake Net for digital creativity using the term “technology of freedom” so that Net can have perfect control both in legal and technical structure.

Industries surely want perfect protection over their contents even if it_blocks the contents’_ circulation over the market. It was the bad example of over-regulation. Boyle talks about Napster as an example of the violation of fair use. Free music spread over the world through Napster and music industries were so mad with the assumption that they would lose profits through illegal copying. They tried lockdown on their CDs to prevent copying even though it caused inconvenience for legitimate purchasers. It fired the desire to get the free music. As Doctorow mentioned the regulation and the failure, it was the endless cycle of the attempts to prevent copying and to copy for free. Then, i-Tunes appeared, Boom! 

I do believe there should be a protection over copyright. However, I think it is important to find a proper margin line between protection of copyright and respect of fair use. I believe i-Tunes is the best model that satisfies both demands for those who want_Napster and those who hate_Napster. I-Tunes has a protection so people cannot get products for free but they can get it cheap. Also, even though the price per song is cheaper than selling a CD, music industries still make_more money than selling CD’s because now people are more willing to pay for a song rather than a whole CD. Contents creators should_ get paid for what they have made whether they charge cheap or expensive and I do not think it would give the customer a problem. The entertainment agencies put up footage of their signers’ new released songs or footages of their actors. We can watch dramas on the Hulu website for free with options on how to watch commercials along  with it. Software developers provide trial samples for their software. Living in the internet age, we still can get tons of legally provided contents. Then, if you want more than that, we should pay for it. You cannot just take a candy from supermarket without paying.  

A Fine Line

In both Doctorow's "Lockdown" and Boyle's "The Public Domain", they talk about the past of privacy and copyright and how it might influence the future of computing. Of course in the past, file sharing wasn't as big of a concern as it is today, but as the nature of the internet changes and consumers have more ways to find copyrighted content, legislators and companies are trying to restrict access to the internet. Coupled with these restrictions, even the manufacturers are starting to sell products that will automatically tell if you have tampered with the software or if you have put illegal content on it. This is fast becoming an invasion of privacy but as long as profits are protected, the out of touch politicians don't deem it illegal.  It was very interesting how Boyle brought up the issue of how many Apple products are hosts of illegal content but of course Apple will never have to face the issue of being sued by a music or movie company. With the recent closure of megaupload and the threat that was SOPA, it is not a far stretch to assume that our time on the internet will become more monitored and restricted.

RightS? Ownership?

I like the idea of “rule of thumb” in the reading of “lockdown” (Cory Doctorow, 7). It makes me think about what the purpose of using computer or Internet is.  I think most of the people would say “share information” especially in the time of 20^th century. Worldwide information transmission is absolutely necessary for nowadays, whether in business purpose or in personal purpose. When the information becomes more and more easy to exchange or copy, then it comes to a question “How to define the right of using that variety of intangible assets?” Then a series of arguments around copyright, license, encryption, fair use, patent, commercial and so on are making people go nut. It seems to me that people are making questions that will harm themselves. When people are making the things easily shared, they oppose people having them by all means at the same time.      

It is very ironic. The reading “The Public Domain”, says “The logic of the Internet Threat leads to the position that a network is either controlled or illegal. The better and cheaper the network, the tighter the control needed.”(James Boyle,25) However, the logic of Internet Threat is opposite of the logic of the Net. The idea of Internet is “freedom from centralized control, absence of intervention” as Boyle says.  Then I complain about the people who put things on the Internet although they are free to do so.  They should not blame people whosteal their things because they let people see it. It seems that it is selfish to say this. However, I have another thought when I put myself into the shoes. People like posting pictures on facebook. They want to share what they have for dinner; however, they don’t want people to use them for their own purpose. Things seems to be easily explained when I flip the situation.

Moreover, I am interested in the use of intellectual property rights on facebook. Here is the Facebook message, “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos, you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.” In other word, Facebook can do and can legally do with my photos, videos, stories, and everything else I might be able to add everything it wants. That means I lost the control of my pictures.

Control and ways of use are the main issues of the computer information world. How we can share and control the things at the same time? It seems to me that if we want to share, we would give up our ownership.

“Rights” always come to a argument about “cost” and “benefits”. As copying costs approach zero, we should bear in mind that the intellectual property rights must approach perfect control. However, I think the logic behind this is a little bit contradicted, like, facebook provides a free platform for you to share your stuff (cost approach zero), then facebook has a right to use my stuff in commercial purpose. What is the logic behind this???

--Ring Sum Chiu

That more or less sums up what I think about SOPA.

James Boyle has a sarcastic method or writing which I find incredibly amusing. He discusses how the length and scope of intellectual property rights have been regulated, while showing how we have managed to skirt around the same limitations we've imposed. "As with fair use, we impose limitations on the rights when we
hand them out in the first place. The exclusive right conferred by copyright does not include the right to prevent criticism, parody, classroom copying, decompilation of computer programs, and so on" (Boyle 68).

My main question which concerns me is in regards to the Supreme Court vs Napster. There was an idea that Napster's file sharing system was "presumptively fair use" (Boyle 73). Even though no money is exchanged, making the file sharing system tantamount to taping a show on VCR (or TiVo), it is still a gateway to potentially make money, is it not? Mr. Boies' argument of "private noncommercial videotaping is equivalent to private noncommercial file sharing. Both are presumptively fair uses" (Boyle 75) doesn't fly with me. Apparently, it didn't fly with the Supreme Court either.

Give a Tweet... About Digi-space!

Cory Doctorow's Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing delves into the issues we currently face in keeping the web and PC "free and open." In light of the copyright battles currently in place, and in response to proposed bills like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, HR. 3261), Doctorow's article is puissantly relevant -- restrictive, uninformed, and/or misguided legislation poses a threat to the future of general purpose computing, as well as online speech. Under SOPA, corporations and individuals would posses unprecedented power to squelch online speech, government would have even greater power to censor and blacklist websites, and yet, still likely fail to stop online piracy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an educative one-pager on the bill: "What's Wrong with SOPA?" A closer overview of the SOPA and PIPA bills is provided by Jason Harvey on Reddit in "A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP." In this analysis, he touches upon why both SOPA and PROTECT IP will likely not stop the piracy they are targeting but will, instead, "introduce regulation and enforce censorship on what should be a free and open internet." In turn, generativity in technology, a principle that Jonathan Zittrain discusses in length and generally favors in his The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, will suffer due to these restrictive regulations. Generativity, the concept that highlights the ability of some technology to allow for innovation in ways the designer never initially predicted, is thought to be integral to the wild success of the general-purpose PC and the Internet. Without the open nature of the Internet, technological innovation may slow down due to regulations and legislation that raise barriers for entry into creating something "new," encumbering future business.

Although the Internet is decentralized and distributed, speech and communication via the Internet requires a series of intermediaries, each one susceptible to some form of muzzling from external pressures. These suppressions may threaten freedom of speech, as a whole. EFF has an informative page depicting the notion that "Free Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Link." In Lockdown, Doctorow discusses how the rule of thumb regulators generally abide by when  passing laws, the idea that "special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility," does not apply for the Internet. He writes,

"There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is the mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement -- it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset." (Doctorow, Lockdown)

He goes on to say that regulators who fail to realize their usual rule of thumb for passing bills does not apply easily for the Internet are not necessarily evil or idiots, but rather, "part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless." That's fodder for thought, and as we explore further, we'll likely find that the threat to general-purpose computing lies deeper than legislation. Our increasing familiarity and reliance on tethered appliances like smartphones, tablets, and game consoles, for one, changes the previous landscape of general-purpose PCs as the norm. Perhaps a large chunk of users are okay with the trade-off of some freedom and functionality of their restricted devices for increased "security" (as dictated by the provider of the service or product) or "better functionality" in the intended use of the item? And as such, another problem comes to light -- perhaps users are indifferent to general-purpose computing. As Doctorow stated, perhaps to them, "end-to-end" and other abstract concepts simply fail to elicit action from individuals that translate to laws that are in the best interest of generativity and a free and open technological realm.

James Doyle delves into the aforementioned sweeping lack of knowledge by the public on the significance of the public domain in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle argues that individuals should have an understanding of intellectual property law because intellectual property rights are integral to the foundation of our information society, and as such, our current policies and laws are often a hindrance to freedom of speech, innovation, and cultural access. In Chapter 4: "The Internet Threat," Doyle delves into more specifics of digital copyright. He indicates that the "Internet threat" is:

"... beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying cheaper and [thus, Big Media] must meet the greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections. ... [W]ithout an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries." (Doctorow, The Public Domain)

But at the same time, he indicates that this line of thinking fails both in painting a complete picture of the situation and in championing cultural and individual expression. Although new technology enables greater potential for cutting into copyright holders' rights, it also allows for the potential to skew the benefit to the copyright holders. If particular corporations or industries, for instance, feel threatened by new technologies, they may want to control the technology that they deem a menace. But since the technology may also be used for legal and legitimate causes that may, in keeping with the history of generativity, it may produce wholly innovational and novel technologies. Thus, there's a fine line between protecting copyright holders and stagnating an emerging and currently, ever-expanding realm of digi-space. 

Free! Free! Free?

FREE! It's just about everyone's favorite number because what's not to love about something that comes at the price of nothing? Need I mention a certain episode of Oprah in which she gave away cars, iPods and a cruise to her audience for supposedly no cost to them? However, when dealing with the Internet, free isn't a word that is embraced.

Doctorow presents us with a very articulate response to the Internet and its relationship to this new phase general-purpose computers are experiencing. With the dawn of the new millennium, issues like copyright and file-to-file downloading become very important topics of discussion for companies and individuals that utilize the Internet as a means of releasing data. It raises the question of who has the right to control what an end user downloads onto their general-computing devices. Does anyone have a right to control what an end user chooses to do?

SOPA instantly comes to mind as a recent example of the struggle between the creator of data and the end user. Nonetheless, Doctorow states that, "this isn't about copyright. The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies." I like this statement because it shows that something much bigger than free content is at play here. This issue is not so much "free content for everyone" as much as it is about the right of the end user in the face of government censorship. 






I'd like to end this serious conversation on a lighter note with one of these lovable Rage Comics:

CopyRIGHT?

In early chapters, we have discussed the new movement of free media on the web, and how it generates income without charging its audience.  While displaying content online may be paid for by advertising or other methods, exposure is given, whatever medium is used and the host has control.  So what's wrong with free content and why isn't everything this way? When someone goes beyond this and take the medium to own without paying, they are illegally copying, therefore committing copyright infringement.  While many different approaches have been taken to stop this, they have either been unsuccessful or have sought action to limit the use of the internet.

According to Lockdown, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization officially made copying illegal in 1996.  Despite the laws they passed, people did not obey this and still continue to engage in acts of copyright infringement.  With the continuing easiness to download content illegally for free, it cannot be seen why this would change.  In addition, more policies must continue to be made in order to regulate this properly, making the the internet censored and holding back its capabilities.  While this might be okay for computers that serve a specific purpose, users of general purpose computers would have a lot of speculation of its usage becoming limited.


I think Doctorow is on point with this article.  He expresses much criticism towards putting these copyright laws in effect because they take so much more work to regulate and feels as if they won't stop people from copywriting.  Much of the techniques he mentions to stop copyright infringement, seem unethical and to invade privacy.  If a person using a rootkit against a big business is seen as illegal, why can the opposite be done?  I don't think people should download everything online for free (especially if they have a good source of income), but the internet shouldn't be censored for all, especially since short cuts will be found to continue illegal downloading.  Something as great as the internet should never be denied its full capabilities, especially if the actions that are trying to be prevented will continue anyway.


In addition to the actions mentioned in Doctorow's piece, The Internet Threat, gives some suggestions how to "better" enforce violators of copyright infringement.  The Author, James Boyle, goes as far to suggest that each computer should be under surveillance with each having a unique ID, as a part of his "Internet Threat" argument.  He also claims that for each song, movie, and ebook one can access have a contract with limitations of its use, that one would be forced to agree to without reading.  Unlike Doctorow, Boyle seems more supportive of increasing restriction on copyright.


I felt rather annoyed reading Boyle's article and I think he's nuts.  If computers were ever to be given an ID, I would like it to be done for security purposes to stop spread of malware, rather than busting broke college students for downloading the new Metallica record.  I will reiterate a point I made earlier, something as great and powerful as the internet should not be owned, regulated, nor limited.  Part of the  reason new bands, authors, and directors have created new media was through Internet research and finding media through online sources.  People need these things to become creative and it helps them get through the stress of their daily lives.  The corporations who produce these things will still make (a lot of) money.  People will give anything a chance if it's free.  By getting rid of downloaded media, the spread of ideas and opinions would move much slower.

The rise of Wikipedia and the fall of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Wow, since 1768!...It's definitely an end of an era. It's not like the Encyclopaedia Britannica is killing a whole lots of tree. 

The CD or the online is jst not the same.

This is another Buggle's moment....or was it Queen, Another Bites The Dust!  Damn...bummer...

http://techland.time.com/2012/03/13/no-more-dead-tree-encyclopaedia-britannica/

Congress Has the People on Their Soap Boxes Over the SOPA Debate

     Despite the enormity of copyright law debates that have occurred over the last few decades, I am going to focus on only one; the most important of our time. SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act, is a currently debated law proposed by Lamar S. Smith. The law would include removal of websites that aided the occurrence of copyright infringement; specifically targeting torrent, file sharing and file storing websites.  To uncover the specifics of this law you can read all about it here. PIPA, or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act is also linked to SOPA. It was proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy on May 12th 2011 in order to provide methods for the United States government to prevent people from being able to access denied websites. SOPA was proposed in order to allow the government to be able to permanently remove offensive or copyright infringing websites. Through the enactment of this law the Attorney General would be able to utilize the federal court system in order to remove unwanted websites' domain names and post the removed websites publicly. Let me just pause right here and say a little bit about our attorney general Eric Holder. He is the same man who recently proposed that voters should no longer require any form of photo ID because the necessity discriminated against minority voters. Yes, lets have this man in charge of what we can and cannot do in our lives. 
     The point of having file sharing abilities in this day and age is not simply for piracy or illegal file sharing. It  may be used for that as well, but it was intended for expansion of ideas, sharing of legitimate content, and ultimate growth of the internet. Original engineers of the internet as well as Tim Berners-Lee have both declared their opposition to the bill and are working toward convincing congress to ignore the proposals. 
     The idea of internet censorship based upon similar principles as those used in China, Seria, Uzbekistan etc. made me want to take action. I don't normally care enough about current legislative debates enough to contribute anything to society in the form of activism, but this was a potential restriction that I was NOT comfortable with. My Facebook page was covered with a few of these links to sign petitions through Demand Progress, the leading advocacy group opposing SOPA.

Demand Progress: Advocacy Group in Opposition to the Bill

    The shutdown of Megaupload on January 19th 2012 demonstrates the pointlessness of SOPA.The FBI and U.S. Dept. of Justice certainly did a good enough job eliminating the largest pirated video file sharing organization on the internet and certainly it can do so again. If other companies/ websites arise such as Napster, or Grokster, as James Boyle explains in Chapter 4 of his novel The Public Domain, they will be shut down now just as the supreme court did then.
     "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." —H.R. 3261 is what the SOPA description claims it will do and yet, the very problems that it will solve will simply create more. These could include restriction of legitimate websites from their upstart, inability for the common user to have a place to store files, and/or a "black market" of internet websites that people WILL figure out how to access. 
     In his article "Lockdown the Coming War on General Purpose Computing," Corey Doctorow explains the ridiculousness of the SOPA and PIPA proposals: The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies. Exactly.
     Isn't there a way to monitor corrupt and illegal use of the internet without dashing the basic principles of why and how it was created? Apparently not, however, the longer the bill is pushed back to be voted on, the more time advocates of internet freedom have to lobby and generate new, better solutions. Also, the more time we have to download all the free stuff we can... before we can't!

Correcting Internet Wrongs with Copyright

Since the dawn of general purpose computers, software developers have been trying to find a way to prevent their beneficiaries and other tech-savvy individuals from duplicating original content owned by those developers and distributing them. Early versions of the Digital Rights Movement sought to prevent those measures, but eventually, programmers found ways to successfully navigate around those barriers. Cory Doctorow mentions in “Lockdown” that process of selling and distributing a copyright file is not the problem, but the duplication and allocation of that copyrighted item is. The example of a solution the author mentions is the encryption of files and requiring programs to unlock that file. Encryption of files is an obsolescent solution that led to an extension of problems, which was counterintuitive to what developers wanted to achieve.

Along came the WIPO Copyright Treaty in 1996, which basically put an end to the whole mess. The law put a stamp on stating that extraction and distribution of these encrypted files was illegal. But once again, just like bacterial pathogens, no matter what solution is used to get rid of the problem, more and more advanced problems arise. The solution is not always as easy as limiting individuals from performing a certain action, because the same individuals will find ways to resist those prohibitions. Instead, developers should focus more on regulation – selling appliances that are safe to use, without having the developers worry whether or not those appliances will be used in other ways than they were originally intended. The question is, “What constitutes this sort of regulation?” “We're not making a computer that runs only the ‘appliance’ app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box”, Doctorow states. Limiting applications and personal computers will not work – this prevents information from reaching the masses. If someone decides to buy an appliance or a computer, the person should not be worrying about what invasive technology that the appliance might have installed in it. Businesses and developers should follow other models of making money (see last week’s readings) if they are concerned about illegal distributions of their products. Technology should be owned by individuals, and not the other way around.

In chapter 4 of James Boyle’s “The Public Domain”, Boyle discusses issues of internet and delves deeper into the specific groundwork of digital copyright. After accessing the reading, a lot of the policies that apply to copyright and the internet are unbalanced. The argument is that the cheaper it is to copy media, the more control the media should have.

The heart of the chapter is defined by these sentences “[…] some of these expansions may indeed have the practical effect of reducing rights that citizens thought they had, such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing among personal friends, resale, and so on. But without an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries. I call this story the Internet Threat” (Boyle 60). Individuals should be entitled to create or innovate so that life can be more efficient – that is the ultimate goal of new technology. However, creating something entirely new cannot be met without some sort of obstacle, as exemplified by industries that will opportunistically jump in and cause a stir when some sort of copyright infringement is occurring. Furthermore, Boyle supports more control over technology (61). How can individuals express their creativity without violating copyright and at the same time not have an encroachment on their freedom of speech by creative industries? The U.S. Congress is trying to pass a bill that will regulate the internet without censorship, thus removing peer-to-peer networking sites such as Pirate Bay, and other websites which stream copyrighted content. Voting on SOPA and PIPA were postponed, but an alternative bill, OPEN, was proposed shortly thereafter. Boyle argues in his book that if online piracy and distribution of copyrighted material continues to circulate on the internet, we will all become poor. Will we enter an era where illegal downloading/sharing is prohibited? We shall see.